Apple used to make PPC 603e based systems with PCI slots, including a consumer minitower - 6400 / 6500 series.
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MP 7,1 Is the new Mac Pro too expensive? [MERGED]
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Apple used to make PPC 603e based systems with PCI slots, including a consumer minitower - 6400 / 6500 series.
Tune up your history machine.
Today:
- Microsoft: $964.213B
- Amazon: $855.919B
- Apple: $839.881B
Stop posting nonsense, please.
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People are insaine. Literally freaking insaine. That system with a 9900k (8 cores that smoke that xeon) and a much better GPU is around half the price, not $8500 as apple lies (sorry, claims). Anyone who justifies that price tag is simply brainwashed. And before you tell me i dont know pro hardware, i build custom high end servers. And that 8 core xeon is crap.
And these end of market day positions will change numerous times throughout the year.
Makes f’ing sense to me.
You set it up as a stand alone system that doesn’t touch the net.
It doesn’t get updated randomly.
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$4500ish gets you a TR with 32 cores, 128gb ram, 1400 watt psu, bluRay, and a WX7100.
Or a 24 core Epyc with the above.
Keep in mind, this fall those CPUs will be bumped up and PCIe 4.0 motherboard.
Because the iMac pro makes no sense anymore. You can get an almost equally fast standard iMac for less money now and if you need even more power, you can go with the Mac Pro.
I just wonder whether the price gamble pays off this time. I’m not sure how many companies will actually want to invest that much. These are times where employers are required to fly coach because business class is too expensive, even for large companies.
The movie industry might be interested but they’ve probably moved the entire workflow to other OSs by now
So do these photographers put their pictures into a You Tube video for it to be compressed down and then watched on 720p 5” screens? If that was your main target audience would you say spending 100 grand plus on one 4K or 5K camera (speaking of RED) is value for money and makes you a pro, JUST because you bought an expensive camera.
Based on your flawed argument because I don’t think you got my point, I could go out and buy an F1 car and be classed an F1 driver just because I bought the race car..
If you think the new Pro is expensive, then sorry but you are very clearly NOT it’s target market, I’m sorry if you feel Apple ‘used’ to offer great products but no longer does, however if you were a professional then as they say no ones holding a gun to your head, you are free to move elsewhere, or buy an iMac Pro.
There is a wide range of professionals. Some do video work, others don't. Some will earn enough to justify 6k minimum, others won't. (Financial considerations are among the most important for professionals, aren't they?)
My point is: ‚Pro‘ or not – neither should you be forced to throw away the whole machine when a part breaks (or you want to upgrade something), because you cannot swap components. Nor should you be force to use a monitor that‘s glued to it. That's why the tower has been successful for decades. Apple‘s entry price into this reasonable model is 6.000 $. THAT is what I find overly expensive. I'm fine with SATA SSDs, non ECC RAM, 3 PCIe slots, etc. Just give me macOS.
My point is: ‚Pro‘ or not – neither should you be forced to throw away the whole machine when a part breaks (or you want to upgrade something), because you cannot swap components. Nor should you be force to use a monitor that‘s glued to it. That's why the tower has been successful for decades. Apple‘s entry price into this reasonable model is 6.000 $. THAT is what I find overly expensive. I'm fine with SATA SSDs, non ECC RAM, 3 PCIe slots, etc. Just give me macOS.
Just like a Z8, you're paying for a huge amount of expandability. There's a $1600 motherboard (the closest equivalent is the Asus Dominus Extreme, and that doesn't have all the slots), probably a $1000 case and cooling system, and a >$500 power supply (the top-end Corsair PSUs with gallium nitride transistors and digital regulation are that much, and I strongly suspect this PSU is even a step higher) in every new Mac Pro.
None of the homemade systems people are advocating come close to topping out where the Mac Pro can - they all outperform the base model, but none of them support the absurd top end configurations of the Mac Pro (or the Z8 for that matter) - try getting quad Vega II GPUs and a terabyte of RAM in them with space left over for a ProRes accelerator card and two PCIe cards stuffed full of blade SSDs. A Mac Pro can do it, a Z8 can do it, a homemade computer without carefully chosen (and equally expensive) components can't.
It makes absolutely no sense if you intend to run it with 32 GB of RAM, an 8-core CPU, a $200 video card and a 256 GB SSD. You can buy an iMac with all of that for $3000 (and Apple gives you a nice monitor with it).
With the possible exception of the SSD, every one of those components could make sense with very powerful components in the other positions.
A $200 video card is fine if you're a music producer (but you might want the 28-core CPU and half a terabyte of RAM).
An 8-core CPU is great for AI work that's all taking place on the twin Vega II Duos.
32 GB of RAM is terrific for the tiny, but extremely fast financial model that's running in the processor cache due to optimization (but that cache is on a 28 core processor, and the PCIe slots are filled with 100 GB network boards that keep the data coming in faster than the hedge fund across the hall).
Or, you can buy half a terabyte of RAM, the twin Vega II Duos, and the 28 core processor - fortunately, it's big enough that your Oscar(s) will fit nicely on top of the computer (very few people who don't have any need all the upgrades on the same machine).
The top configuration is for Hollywood (and maybe for NSA spies), but the flexibility is for a somewhat wider range of users who need a ton of something. That flexibility costs money, and leads to a machine that's absurdly priced if you don't need it, but very fairly priced if you do.
I suspect we have two more pro machines to go this year (probably released in October or November when the cheesegrater ships), and that they'll make a lot of users happy (neither one will make people who want NVidia happy).
1.) 32" iMac Pro. Yes, I suspect a (slightly detuned) version of the XDR panel is bound for the iMac Pro. It'll be a $6000 computer, but not a $10,000 computer. How the heck will they fit it in the budget? Well, Apple is sometimes willing to take a near-zero margin on the display in an iMac (not on the rest of the iMac, but on the display only). They take the low margin at first, figuring that the panels will get cheaper over the life of the design. When the 27" Retina came out, any monitor with that panel was more expensive than the whole iMac, and the original 27" iMac was only $700 more than the Thunderbolt Display (which was the same machine, minus the Mac).
The XDR display probably has a 50% margin as a specialized piece of hardware. That leads to something like a $2000 panel cost ($500 goes to casing, powering and Thunderbolting the display). If Apple will take a zero on the panel, they can build an iMac Pro around it that would sell for $4000 with no display and sell the combination for $6000. Since iMacs have a 40 percent margin (or so), that leaves them $2400 at wholesale for other parts.
In fact, they probably have a little more than that because of the Apple Tax. Very few people buy iMac Pros without upgrading the RAM and/or SSD, both of which have a margin well in excess of 40% (60%???). Assuming that the average iMac Pro gets $1500 in overpriced upgrades (64 GB of RAM plus the 2 TB SSD is $1000, while 128 GB of RAM alone is $2000), they have an extra $300 to play with. $2700 worth of parts at Apple's cost is a very nice machine...
2.) A new 16"+ MacBook Pro, introduced as a new model above the 15" (just like the Retina came in as a top model, then replaced the Unibody). If the display is a LCD, it'll be around $3299 in a generous starting configuration with an 8-core CPU, a Vega 20 and either 32 GB of RAM or a terabyte SSD standard (I could see either a 16/1 TB or a 32/512 starting configuration standard - most buyers would probably upgrade to 32/1 TB or higher). It could also have an OLED display and a starting price around $3999. If the first model is OLED, they need a LCD model (or a huge price break on OLED) within a year - they can't replace the 15"with a machine that's $1000 more expensive.
None of the homemade systems people are advocating come close to topping out where the Mac Pro can - they all outperform the base model, but none of them support the absurd top end configurations of the Mac Pro (or the Z8 for that matter) - try getting quad Vega II GPUs and a terabyte of RAM in them with space left over for a ProRes accelerator card and two PCIe cards stuffed full of blade SSDs. A Mac Pro can do it, a Z8 can do it, a homemade computer without carefully chosen (and equally expensive) components can't.
It makes absolutely no sense if you intend to run it with 32 GB of RAM, an 8-core CPU, a $200 video card and a 256 GB SSD. You can buy an iMac with all of that for $3000 (and Apple gives you a nice monitor with it).
With the possible exception of the SSD, every one of those components could make sense with very powerful components in the other positions.
A $200 video card is fine if you're a music producer (but you might want the 28-core CPU and half a terabyte of RAM).
An 8-core CPU is great for AI work that's all taking place on the twin Vega II Duos.
32 GB of RAM is terrific for the tiny, but extremely fast financial model that's running in the processor cache due to optimization (but that cache is on a 28 core processor, and the PCIe slots are filled with 100 GB network boards that keep the data coming in faster than the hedge fund across the hall).
Or, you can buy half a terabyte of RAM, the twin Vega II Duos, and the 28 core processor - fortunately, it's big enough that your Oscar(s) will fit nicely on top of the computer (very few people who don't have any need all the upgrades on the same machine).
The top configuration is for Hollywood (and maybe for NSA spies), but the flexibility is for a somewhat wider range of users who need a ton of something. That flexibility costs money, and leads to a machine that's absurdly priced if you don't need it, but very fairly priced if you do.
I suspect we have two more pro machines to go this year (probably released in October or November when the cheesegrater ships), and that they'll make a lot of users happy (neither one will make people who want NVidia happy).
1.) 32" iMac Pro. Yes, I suspect a (slightly detuned) version of the XDR panel is bound for the iMac Pro. It'll be a $6000 computer, but not a $10,000 computer. How the heck will they fit it in the budget? Well, Apple is sometimes willing to take a near-zero margin on the display in an iMac (not on the rest of the iMac, but on the display only). They take the low margin at first, figuring that the panels will get cheaper over the life of the design. When the 27" Retina came out, any monitor with that panel was more expensive than the whole iMac, and the original 27" iMac was only $700 more than the Thunderbolt Display (which was the same machine, minus the Mac).
The XDR display probably has a 50% margin as a specialized piece of hardware. That leads to something like a $2000 panel cost ($500 goes to casing, powering and Thunderbolting the display). If Apple will take a zero on the panel, they can build an iMac Pro around it that would sell for $4000 with no display and sell the combination for $6000. Since iMacs have a 40 percent margin (or so), that leaves them $2400 at wholesale for other parts.
In fact, they probably have a little more than that because of the Apple Tax. Very few people buy iMac Pros without upgrading the RAM and/or SSD, both of which have a margin well in excess of 40% (60%???). Assuming that the average iMac Pro gets $1500 in overpriced upgrades (64 GB of RAM plus the 2 TB SSD is $1000, while 128 GB of RAM alone is $2000), they have an extra $300 to play with. $2700 worth of parts at Apple's cost is a very nice machine...
2.) A new 16"+ MacBook Pro, introduced as a new model above the 15" (just like the Retina came in as a top model, then replaced the Unibody). If the display is a LCD, it'll be around $3299 in a generous starting configuration with an 8-core CPU, a Vega 20 and either 32 GB of RAM or a terabyte SSD standard (I could see either a 16/1 TB or a 32/512 starting configuration standard - most buyers would probably upgrade to 32/1 TB or higher). It could also have an OLED display and a starting price around $3999. If the first model is OLED, they need a LCD model (or a huge price break on OLED) within a year - they can't replace the 15"with a machine that's $1000 more expensive.
I'm one of those, and the reason we cling to them, is because they are great for what we actually need, whereas the new ones are not. I've owned three Mac Pros, which I sold when I started doing more 3ds Max and didn't have as much use for them. When I wanted to go back to Mac, it was gone, replaced by... a weird thing that depended on a thousand peripherals. Since then, I've bought one Lenovo workstation (Xeon/Quadro/ECC and all the bells and whistles), one MacBook Pro in lieu of the Mac Pro, and recently I built an AMD pc. I'd have happily bought a decent Mac Pro had they kept upgrading the old one. Instead, my money has gone to pcs. I know tens of people and small companies who used to have/work on Mac Pros who have just stopped waiting and moved to PC.
If Apple made something actually desirable at a reasonable price point they'd sell more of them, which in turn would keep people in the ecosystem. With their shenanigans all they do is drive people away.
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I don't know what twisted idea of a professional you have where budgets don't exist, but in the real world, there are margins and competitors and things like that. The cheapest Mac Pro usable for video will be at least 8000. You can get a great Resolve/Premiere computer for that money (or you think people who spend 8K on a Mac Pro actually use FCPX
)Apple **** on video editors when they replaced FCP7 with FCPX. They **** on photographers when they replaced Aperture with Photos. All these had cross platform alternatives, and Apple basically drove them out. Given the choice of running Premiere or Resolve or whatever on a solid pc, or pay five times the price to run the same software on a fancy Mac, people will keep moving on and walking away (and rightly so).
This new Mac Pro is all about performance and price is just an afterthought. Guess what? For performance, there are much better options (although I'm curious about the FPGA, it has a lot of potential), and price IS important when you run a company.
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And so did Amazon and look at the Amazon Phone. And Blackberry. And Nokia. And Apple with the trashcan and iTunes ******* Ping and now this cheese grater. And Samsung with some products. Companies make mistakes. They don't matter much when they have deep pockets, but they are still mistakes. The reality distortion field is still strong with some of you guys.
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Anytime I feel something I want either career wise or personally is out of my price range. It motivates me to get to that level.
Just priced out an Alienware as a potential workstation for myself:
8-core i9 9900k - 3.6ghz, 5ghz turbo (compared to the Mac Pro's 4ghz turbo speed)
64GB of 3200mhz RAM (compared to the Mac Pro's 2666mhz)
An NVIDIA RTX 2080ti (vs a Radeon Pro 580X)
A 2TB SSD AND A 2TB HDD (vs 256GB SSD in the Mac Pro...)
WiFi6!
Liquid cooling!
$3934!!!!!!!!!!
This system is an order of magnitude more powerful than the one you get in the $6k Mac Pro... anyone want to explain to me where exactly that extra $2k of value is hiding in the Mac Pro?
8-core i9 9900k - 3.6ghz, 5ghz turbo (compared to the Mac Pro's 4ghz turbo speed)
64GB of 3200mhz RAM (compared to the Mac Pro's 2666mhz)
An NVIDIA RTX 2080ti (vs a Radeon Pro 580X)
A 2TB SSD AND A 2TB HDD (vs 256GB SSD in the Mac Pro...)
WiFi6!
Liquid cooling!
$3934!!!!!!!!!!
This system is an order of magnitude more powerful than the one you get in the $6k Mac Pro... anyone want to explain to me where exactly that extra $2k of value is hiding in the Mac Pro?
ECC RAM and a Xeon to start with.
The fact that you’re compare your spec to this shows that you aren’t the target for this machine.
Most users will be using an external storage mechanism.. in fact, most professionals do.
Liquid cooking isn’t required...
Does your machine support the same expansibility? Likely not.
First of all, not all pros need a xeon, and second of all the Xeon in the $6000 mac pro isn't much more expensive than an i9 9900k. ECC ram also isn't too much more expensive, but the ram in the mac pro is a good deal slower, and there's half as much. Yeah a lot of pros use external storage for large projects.... still nice to have internal storage though... No, liquid cooling isn't required... just like a xeon and ecc ram...
You know what is required? POWER. You get the same power as a $3400 iMac in the $6k Mac Pro, so I'll ask again, where EXACTLY is the extra $2000 in value?
[doublepost=1559804932][/doublepost]So many "you're clearly not a real pro" people... if the $6k Mac Pro is powerful enough for you, then you're not a real pro.
Having the money to upgrade it to something worth having doesn't make you a "real pro" and not having that money doesn't make you less than a pro. It also doesn't mean you don't deserve a decent computer, which is what all the "you're not a real pro" people are basically saying. Plenty of pros can afford a $6k workstation, but not a $10k workstation. But that means the $6k workstation has to actually do what they need it to, which the Mac Pro does not.
Speaking for myself, the value is in macOS. The ability to seamlessly transition from my previous Mac Pro to the new Mac Pro and not having to deal with Windows or a PC. Connecting the new Pro Display XDR to the Mac Pro in the knowledge that colour calibration will be accurate and I have the best image quality possible for my client work, right out of the box. $2000 is an extremely small price to pay for that. I just wouldn't be confident that an Alienware PC, Windows 10 and an Acer display could provide that. If that works for you then great, but please understand that image quality is critical to a lot of us and we have to look beyond price and clock speed when considering a new workstation. The way we measure the value of this machine is just different to you.
The use cases for this might need ECC, I don’t know since I don’t do media production. ECC is typically slower.
Those two things can drive up costs. A Xeon is a different class of processor to the i9, they have different applications.
These two things for me are important but not critical for some things I work on. Yet crucial for other things I do work on. Go figure.
Then you have the expansibility of the system.
That values of these are different to both of us.
Firstly it's not 'an order of magnitude' more powerful, go look up what that actually would mean.
It's an mild spec bump in some areas (Ram etc.), and a big jump in others (GPU), but as someone else was trying to explain on the previous page, in this market needs vary. The CPU melters don't need big GPUs, the GPU melters don't need big CPUs, some people need lots of Ram, some don't, some need local storage, for others it's all in an external rack, and the point of the base spec Mac Pro is that it's essentially a starting point for you to build in the actual functionality you need and scale it up massively if needed. Just like when you buy a Z4/6/8 from HP, the bottom end model is essentially a scalable chassis with some placeholder components in it, which is fine when the components you're going to fit eclipse the cost of the chassis, when we buy hardware for work we often end up doubling the cost of the machine just by adding the extra ram we need...and double again when we bump the CPU or add another one.
What you specced out in your post was the (near) top end of platform A, and compared it with the bottom end of platform B, there's overlap and there always will be, but the scalability of the new Mac Pro is well beyond a souped up desktop, and that's where a lot of it's extra value is.
If you can do you work on a kitted out desktop then great, you'll save some cash, if you can't and you need to go bigger, then this (and Z4/6/Z8s from HP) will cater to your needs, but it'll cost more.
Much sense here. Professionally, I may be using the new Mac Pro this year or next; personally, I'll pick one up on eBay or as part of a studio disposal in 3-5 years when my MacPro5,1 is utterly unserviceable. Then it's tinker time. If I'm desperate in the meantime, I could play with a Hackintosh.
The real bonus for home enthusiasts like me is that there's a reason beyond external chassis for companies to continue developing Mac-compatible PCIe hardware, not just Thunderbolt dongles.
It'll be interesting to see how long the logic board goes without revision. It didn't change for five years or more with the 4,1 and 5,1. If the new cheesegrater chassis proves to be as good as the old one (and aesthetics apart, it seems great) then there's no reason to touch that for a very long time.
I like the handles... it's just those feet...
This is irrelevant and I never insinuated Apple is infallible.
Bottom line is, Apple didn’t just pull a number out of a hat. The OP asked a question, and I replied.
They get it right, they get it right.
They get it wrong, they get it wrong.
Doesn’t change the relevance of my reply.
Seems some people want to jump on the most basic of responses and read way too much into it to fit their own reality of what was said.
On the plus side, you get a free license to Octane X Enterprise Edition when purchasing a new Mac Pro. That's is $699 off if Octane is your thing. Yay!
https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-wwdc2019/
https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-wwdc2019/
No what I mean is it's targeted at people that used to spend 10-20K, and will do so again the fact that you can buy a base spec one at 6k is largely an irrelevance as I don't think they'll be selling many at that spec.
The kit in the base spec model is largely placeholders, just like HP do with the Z series (but worse!). The expectation is that it'll get configured for actual needs rather than trying to be high end in all areas.
Some will bump the CPU and stay with the crappy GPU cos they don't need GPU power
Some will bump the GPU as that'll be where they need the grunt
Some will bump the Ram..
Some the Storage...
Some will bump a combination etc.
That's the point of a modular and expandable system, you don't spend the money where you don't need it. In an ideal world they'd be listing the chassis and then BTO every other part, but they have to put 'some' standard spec options together for off-the-peggers but it's never really supposed to offer anything other than a starting point.
I know the whole "if the price seems steep you're not the right market" meme has already worn thin but I think it's even more than that, I think it's a case of "if you're looking at the base spec and trying to justify it then you're not the right market"
Viewed as a chassis with ' (decent) placeholders good enough to make a bootable and working machine' is more in line, it might be that some of those placeholder components are adequate for you needs but if not then you put the extras in that you need for your workload, rather than sinking money into bits you don't need. I might be fine with a £35 GPUs to display my desktop smallish screen, but I might need the Ram and CPU grunt, other people need monster GPUs and barely any CPU, neither want to be spending money on components they don't need by having to buy high spec everything just to get the high spec one thing.